She insists that “[Romance novels] are, rather, the end products of a much-mediated, highly complex, material and social process that involves writers, literary agents, publishing officials, and editors, as well as hundreds of other people who participate in the manufacture, distribution, and selling of books,”[2] It is also asserted that the reader plays a significant part in the publishing industry, as romance novels were often purchased by mail order in the 1980s, the reader could order subscriptions to certain publishing houses in advance, as they could come to expect the quality of the authors whose titles were included in the subscription.
Multiple polls are featured throughout this section, displaying favorite archetypes of heroines and heroes, as well as what comprises a “good” and “bad” romance novel.
Radway emphasizes the idea of a happy, satisfying ending as well as the struggle of the heroine, who often, if not always, lives in a state of weakness in a patriarchal society.
While this might seem demeaning to women, Radway explains that “By picturing the heroine in relative positions of weakness, romances are not necessarily endorsing her situation, but examining an all-too-common state of affairs in order to display possible strategies for coping with it,”[4] The love story of a romance novel does not constitute the entirety of the novel.
Radway explains this further with this excerpt: Reading is not a self-conscious, productive process in which they collaborate with the author, but an act of discovery during which they glean from her information about people, places, and events not themselves in the book.
Therefore, the use of clichés, uncomplicated syntax, and signifiers which utilize familiar cultural elements assists the Romance genre.
The romance genre is precisely that: a genre, and one that serves not as an artistic tool but one that, for a little while, assures its readers of their own self-worth and ability to affect a patriarchic world, so by the end of the novel the female readers, often mothers, feel invigorated and ready to take on the day-to-day tasks of managing the home and family.